Information technology is changing rapidly and now forms an invisible layer that increasingly touches nearly every aspect of business and social life. An emerging computer model known as cloud computing addresses the explosive growth of Internet-connected devices, and complements the increasing presence of technology in today's world. Cloud computing is a model of service delivery for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g. networks, network bandwidth, servers, processing, memory, storage, applications, virtual machines, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or interaction with a provider of the service.
Cloud computing is massively scalable, provides a superior user experience, and is characterized by new, Internet-driven economics. In one perspective, cloud computing involves storage and execution of business data inside a cloud which is a mesh of inter-connected data centers, computing units and storage systems spread across geographies. For example, the emerging cloud paradigm has the key concepts of automation, virtualization, consolidation, etc. for offering software as a service (SaaS) and/or infrastructure (e.g., data storage) as a service (IaaS). When offering software as a service, the service can be consumed by multiple consumers. Similarly, when offering infrastructure as a service, the infrastructure may be shared by multiple clients.
While clients may be inclined towards purchasing such cloud services for cost savings and convenience, the main hindrance can be their lack of trust in service providers to protect and ensure data security from other clients who share the cloud services. Service providers may provide a spectrum of security mechanisms, such as, for example, user identifier (ID) and password-based authentication and/or token exchange-based mechanisms, which provide limited or no control to the tenants. However, even with this security architecture in place, clients may still not have complete trust in the security of their data.